How work can be – Stories of agile & lean

The Missing Manual for Retromat: 5 tricks that might come in handy

Every once in a while I realise that others aren’t aware of certain features in Retromat. These feature are not exactly hidden, but they are not super obvious either. I’d like to share them with you, just in case there’s one you didn’t know.

0. Step through all activities in a phase with the arrows

For completeness sake, let’s start with the most obvious one. I won’t even count these as a trick: The arrows:

Because in a random plan the activtities will not work with each other, the arrows let you step through all activities in a given phase. Pick activities that fit with each other. If you’re a beginner, try this plan.

1. Click on a phase’s name to see all its activities

The arrows are too slow? You want to quickly scan all activities in a phase? Just click the phase’s name.

2. Check out a single activity by clicking on its ID

Let’s say you want to share a single activity with a colleague: Click on its ID and voila 🙂

3. Click those buttons!

Noticed the row of buttons?

This one generates a new random plan:

It’s supposed to be a wheel of fortune, in case you were wondering.

And then there’s the search buttons:

The left-hand button is just there to be a visible way to search for a specific ID.

The right-hand button lets you search for words and IDs. The search algorithm looks at titles, summaries and descriptions. If you enter more than one word any one of them is enough for a match. It’s an “or” search, not an “and” search.

As soon as you enter a number as part of your search term, you’ll get the activity of the same ID among the search results.

I’ve been wanting to kick out the ID search button for years but have never really gotten around to it. It’s not really needed.

4. Change the ID to get the activities into a custom order

From the moment I first conceived Retromat I wanted plans to be easily shareable. That’s why each plan has an ID. And you can change the order of activities by changing the ID around. You can change the ID either in the browser’s URL field or by clicking into the Plan ID:

This comes in really handy, when you want to break out of the 5 phases. You see, Retromat is somewhat limited in that each activity can only belong to one phase, although many of them arguably fit into several. If you want to repurpose an activity for a different phase than I sorted it in, go ahead, change the IDs around and press enter!

5. Something completely different – An Easter Egg

There’s another way to forgo phases: Did you know that Retromat has a secret phase called “Something completely different”? You’ve got a 1 in 25 chance of getting a plan with just 1 single activity – one from this extra phase.